Public Bill Committee

[Robert Key in the Chair]

Clause 4

The absolute low income target

Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.

Andrew Selous: Despite the clauses title, it is based, as Committee members have pointed outthe hon. Member for Northavon will shortly seek to catch your eye on that point, Mr. Keyon a rather curious methodology that it will perhaps cause the Government little difficulty to achieve. It refers to the absolute low income target but relates to an equalised net income for households with less than 60 per cent. of median income, with a base year of 1 April 2010. Ordinarily, a normal amount of economic growth should lift the vast majority of families in the UK comfortably above that baseline. By 2020 we will hopefully have had 10 years of growth, as we are told that the UK economy is returning to growth as we speak and we all hope that we will avoid another horrid recession in the coming decade.
There are questions about whether the target is demanding and whether it is a genuine absolute low income target. When giving evidence to the Committee, Rev. Paul Nicolson and others mentioned minimum income standards, such as the cost of feeding a family, which might be the type of definition that members of the public would more easily identify with the phrase absolute low income. What is the absolute minimum amount of income one needs to put food on the table and clothes on the backs of ones family and to keep ones house warm? Would the Minister explain the methodology used and state why that particular target has been set in relation to absolute low income?

Steve Webb: I suppose every Bill has its clause 4 moment, and this is it for this Bill. As someone famously never said, I am not convinced that we need a clause 4. It relates to one of four targets, and it is the one that could be done with ones eyes closed. It is the one that has been put in the Bill to enable Ministers to sleep at night.
The figures for households below average income provide that sort of statistic for the preceding 10 years, so the 1998-99 median is used as the baseline and the figures from nine years later show that in the baseline year 3.4 million children were living in poverty. However, holding the baseline constant, that figure had halved to 1.7 million by 2007-08. I cannot think of a meaningful definition of poverty to which the answer would be, It has halved in the past 10 years, and I do not think that in his heart of hearts the Financial Secretary could either. Is it even an interesting question? It is a little like saying, Well, the Victorians used to think that an inside lav was the height of luxury, but things have moved on since then. If we are serious about tackling child poverty in any meaningful way, holding things constant and assuming that the world is still as it was a decade ago will not lead us to ask interesting questions.
There is a more serous point. If we have four targets, one of which is a gimme that we can effectively tick now, does that undermine the ability to hold the Government to account for failing to meet one or more of the others? If we got rid of clause 4 so that we had only three targets and the Government failed to meet two of them, one might say that was hopeless. If we have four targets, of which we can assume that one is already met so that the Government are halfway there, perhaps the public opprobrium and the pressure for action will be less. Although in theory the enforcement mechanism is judicial review, we all know that the famous court of public opinion and the extent to which our electorate demand action from us will come into play. If we just have targets that are easy to meet, and not stretching, we may inadvertently con the public into thinking that something has been achieved when it has not. I suggest that clause 4 does not stand part of the Bill, because it does not add anything.

Graham Stuart: The hon. Gentleman asks whether there is any way that we can see poverty on any measure having reduced over the past 10 years. The proposal is to raise the absolute income target figure with inflation over the years. The truth is that, at an absolute level, not a relative onethat is the point and it is clear in the clause titlethe number of people who do not have that level of money today will increase in future, so there will be a reduction, and there is a measurement of something real. The measure is an actual amount of money, not a measure against everyone else. Perhaps the school trips will be better, the holidays longer and the presents required bigger, but there will have been an absolute increase in the level of the households income and therefore there is a purpose to having the target.

Steve Webb: I think I asked whether there was any meaningful definition of poverty on which we could say poverty had halved in the past 10 years. That is what has happened on the absolute poverty measure for the past 10 years, holding the baseline of 10 years ago. I do not think that there is a meaningful definition. We may differ, but I do not think that that is an interesting question, although in a sense that is a slightly academic point. The principal point is that it is one of four targets that the Government will meet with their eyes closed. Even a Conservative Government could meet that target. That is why I think it would be an unnecessarily easy target to have in the Bill.

David Gauke: The hon. Gentleman again makes an interesting point. I take his point about the target being unambitious, but much though we recognise that relative poverty is important, he appears to be arguing that absolute poverty is unimportant, or is something that we should not be too worried about. Perhaps the better approach, given his argument, would be to have a more ambitious absolute poverty target as opposed to getting rid of that target altogether.

Steve Webb: There is a bit of confusion about the word absolute. It is not absolute in a can you feed and clothe yourself? sense. I can do no better than quote footnote 2 in the Library note, which says:
Confusingly, Government statements sometimes refer to figures on individuals in households below income thresholds held constant in real terms over time
that is these ones
as indicating the numbers living in absolute poverty, but this is quite different from the ordinary meaning.
In other words, we are not talking about how many people can do the basics of lifefeed and clothe themselves and all the rest of it. We are talking about how many people are below a price-indexed version of the 60 per cent. median before housing costs and equivalised definition from 10 years ago, which is not interesting. It does not measure anythingit is just a number off a graph from 10 years ago.
It is true that we are hitting a moving target on the relative measures and that is a problem, but in my understanding poverty is where a person is. In the third world it is about clean water and food, but in this country our understanding of poverty must be deeper and richer than that. That is my essential contention and why I do not think that such an undemanding target should be in the Bill.

Stephen Timms: The reason we have included the absolute low-income target is to ensure that the incomes of the least well-off families rise in real terms over the next decade, and to ensure that such families are able to improve their standards of living and provide their children with the basic essentials. It is true that over the past decade gross domestic product has been growing and living standards rising. In that sense, for much of the decadealthough not all of itthe number below the threshold set in terms of 1997 incomes was declining, although the number in absolute poverty has stabilised over the past few years, so it is not absolutely automatic that the number will always go up whatever happens.
Subsections (1) to (4) require that by 2020, less than 5 per cent. of children are living in households with an income below 60 per cent. of the 2010 median income before housing costs. There was support in the consultation for including an indicator of that kind. That is at the heart of my argument. We asked people whether they thought that there should be an absolute poverty indicator. There was a variety of views, but a small majoritya majority neverthelessfavoured including one. I think the reason was to make absolutely sure that in terms of living standards, we do not go backwards for the poorest families. There could be a scenario where relative poverty falls, but absolute poverty as defined in this way might not. There is therefore an underpinning, or a backstop, provided by the target, which the majoritya small majority, but nevertheless a majorityof people we consulted thought was worth having.
The crucial thing is whether the incomes of the least well-off families will rise, at least in line with prices. During a downturn such as the one we are in at the moment, when average incomes may be flat or falling, one can envisage that while there may be fewer children in relative poverty, their family incomes may actually be falling.

Steve Webb: The Minister is right to say that over the very short term the number has been static, but is he really asking us to believe that it is a credible scenario that real living standards will be lower in a decades time than they are now? That is presumably the only circumstance in which one target will not dominate another one.

Stephen Timms: The question is whether we will achieve the 5 per cent. target. It is not a static target, but 5 per cent., which means that we will have to make a fair amount of progress on the indicator over the next 10 years. As I said, it is a kind of backstop safeguard for the incomes, in real terms, of the least well-off families. The majority view in the consultationI think rightlywas that it was worth including.
I think I am right in sayingalthough I hesitate in going into this territory because the hon. Gentleman knows a great deal more about it than I dothat this is how it is done in the US. There is a lot of talk in the US about people in poverty. I think an absolute measureabsolute in terms that were defined a long time agois used there. I take the hon. Gentlemans point that we certainly should not use it as our only measure, as they do in the States. However, as one of four, it is a helpful backstop and safeguard, as the majority in the consultation thought, too. On that basis, I commend the targets inclusion, and the clause, to the Committee.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause 4 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 5

The persistent poverty target

Steve Webb: I beg to move amendment 23, in clause 5, page 2, line 37, leave out 2015 and insert 2012.
Lest I be misunderstood or thought grudging, I should say that I think that the presence of a range of poverty targets in the Bill is entirely welcomewith the exception of the target that we have just discussed. The inclusion of material deprivation is a welcome step, as is the inclusion of persistent poverty in clause 5. They are all good things that future Governments will come to rue, I am sure.
Amendment 23 relates to one of the details of the persistent poverty target, namely the date, set out in clause 5(3), by which the target percentage has to be prescribed by regulations. When I first read the clause, I could not believe what I saw. Here we are in 2009, legislating for a process that we are already meant to be halfway through, and we will be three quarters of the way through the process before we have even decided what the target is on one of the four key measures. That seems a bit slow.
There will be arguments about data, I am sure, and I welcome the fact that, as I understand it, the Government are commissioning what is known in the academic literature as a socking great panel survey, which will be much bigger than what we had before. I remember working on the British household panel survey in years gone by. Wonderful though it was, it was certainly small. Given the annual panel attrition, and given that we started with only 5,000 households, we soon got to small sample sizes. The idea of basing that indicator on something much bigger gets me salivating. It is entirely a good thing.
Having said that, it is not a good enough excuse to say, We have to put the panel into the field, and then we have to have another wave and yet another wave. We then have to crunch the numbers and think about it for a few more years, and then we will have a target. The target should bite on Government policy, but how can it do so if it does not exist until halfway through the remainder of the period?
How can the child poverty commission recommend action that will enable us to hit the targets in clause 5 if it has not decided what they are? Given that we are talking about some of the most difficult poverty to tackle, namely persistent povertythere is a clue in the title, as it wereleaving the setting of the target until five years down the track seems problematic. It is an oversimplification to say that we would be just leaving the issue; clearly, one would want to be doing something about persistent poverty, anyway, but how much something would you need to do, and for which groups? We will not know until 2015. The Minister will say that subsection (3) only says that the regulations should be made not later than 2015, but that is an awful lot of leeway.
Our modest amendment simply brings the target forward to 2012, not because that is the year of the Olympics, but because that gives the Government half as much time as they wantthey want six years, and we want to give them three. That is not a very scientific reason either, but we are trying to probe why the Government think that they need six years. The gist of the argument is that the target will be really difficult to meet. We are dealing with intractable, persistent poverty that requires an awful lot of work and concentration of effort. If we do not know what the targets are until halfway through the period, how on earth, in that final five years, are things to be done? Yes, we can start now, but if we do not know the scale of what we are even trying to achieve until six years down the track, what hope have we got of achieving it? I encourage the Committee to accept our amendment.

Andrew Selous: The hon. Gentleman has done the Committee a service in tabling the amendment. I am minded to support it, if he is willing to press it to a Division. He makes an entirely fair point. It is now 2009; it is six years to 2015, which is a long time to wait. If we are to have a definition, we need to know what it is sooner rather than later, so that we can drive policy in a sensible direction. I cannot think of any good reason why the setting of the target should be left so late, so I listen with interest to the Ministers defence of the 2015 date.

Stephen Timms: The amendment would require the target to be set before 2012, rather than before 2015. I just point out that the wording in the Bill is before, not by. In other words, in order to meet the timetable set out in the Bill, that target would have to be prescribed by regulations made by 2014, so we are not talking about setting the target halfwaythe whole halfway, anywaythrough the period, although we are talking about a fair chunk of the first half of the decade.
I am grateful to the hon. Member for Northavon for welcoming the inclusion of the persistent poverty target. I agree with him that the number of children below the poverty line in three years out of four is a very important and telling piece of data. The target was welcomed by the witnesses who gave evidence last week, and it will enable us to focus attention on families who spend significant periods of time below the poverty line.
The reason for the delay until 2014or possibly earlier; the target percentage would have to be set by 2014is, as the hon. Gentleman anticipated, the new, larger survey. I note that he is salivating over it; let me give him a little more information about it. As he knows, the survey currently used to measure persistent poverty is the British household panel survey. That is being subsumed, from this year, within a new survey, Understanding Societya larger survey, as he saidwhich we intend to use to measure persistent poverty in the future. The first full set of data from that survey will be available in 2011, and the second full set in 2012.
I hope that I can persuade the hon. Gentleman that it would be technically impossible to comply with his proposal, which is that the target be set before 2012. We will simply not have the second set of data by then, and once we receive it, it will need to be analysed if we are to come up with a sensible and intelligent target for persistent poverty. We could argue that we need more than two years of data, but we want to deal with the issue on the basis of the first two years. I hope that the Committee accepts that we need at least two years of data if we are to come up with a sensible target.

Graham Stuart: Obviously, the data required for the purposes of subsection (3) do not currently exist. What data do the Government have that would be relevant?

Stephen Timms: We do have data. They depend on whether one uses the McClements measure, or the OECD equivalence scale. However, the most recent data indicate that 1.4 million children10 per cent. of all UK childrenwere in persistent poverty from 2004 to 2007. That proportion is down by 7 per cent. from 1997 to 2000. We have therefore made good progress on that measure, but, as I have said, there will be a discontinuity in the survey, and we need to assess the new survey before we can sensibly set a target; otherwise, we will be setting it in the dark.

Graham Stuart: If we have a reasonably robust number, why do we need to wait, for target-setting purposes, for the welcome and salivatingly delicious extended new survey before setting a target and sending a message to policy makers and Departments about the cross-departmental arrangements that need to be put in place to tackle the issue?

Stephen Timms: We do so on the basis of the expert advice that we have taken. We simply do not know what the new survey will show. It will be conducted on an entirely different basis, and the numbers will not necessarily be continuous with the previous measure; there could be a discontinuity in one direction or the other. Until we have seen the data, we just will not know. It might be helpful if I assured the Committee that we seek to deal with the matter as quickly as we can. Neither the Government nor I have an interest in causing delay. The point is purely technical; we need the data before we can credibly set a target. That is the view of those who have advised us on the issue.

Steve Webb: The Minister said what I thought he would say about the data, but what about the point that we have a perfect storm here? The last target to be set relates to what is arguably the most intractable problem to solve. Is there not a case for bringing forward the target so that we can get on and tackle the intractable problem?

Stephen Timms: I do not think that we need to delay addressing the problem. When the strategy is produced, within a year of Royal Assent, it will need to address the problem straight away. We will not know the target, or its numerical value, until we have analysed the second wave of data.

Steve Webb: I appreciate the Minister engaging with the question, but I find his answer one of the least convincing that we have heard. I do not see how one can set out a strategy to meet a target that does not exist. One can have a strategy to tackle persistent poverty, but the target will bring in wholly different sets of people, depending on whether it ends up being 3, 5 or 7 per cent. If the target is only 3 per cent., that clearly represents one particular sort of child. If we broaden the measure much more and set a higher target, that might involve interventions in a whole different set of circumstances. We would be completely in the dark if we did not have a target for the first four or five years. The system could be fatally flawed if we do not know the target early on.
As the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness rightly said, there are data. The British household panel survey goes back to the start of the 90s. It is not brilliant, and it is not big, but it is not that bad. People have been making academic careers out of it for long enough. I do not see why we should not say, This new bigger survey will clearly be more detailed, but it is a household survey, as the other one was. A Government who are serious about such a target will struggle to approach it rationally if it does not exist for five years. Clearly, the Minister will not have his new data in time to meet our target, but a run of 15-odd years of the old data tells him enough to set a rational target. In any case, clause 5 allows the Government to vary the target if they need to, in the light of further information, so the target percentage would be a ballpark figure, not an absolute figure. On that basis, I encourage the Committee to accept the amendment.

Question put, That the amendment be made.

The Committee divided: Ayes 7, Noes 9.

Question accordingly negatived.

Clause 5 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 6

Interpretation of terms used in relation to targets

Steve Webb: I beg to move amendment 24, in clause 6, page 3, line 13, at end insert
(f) The publication of analysis of the sensitivity of the estimates of child poverty under sections 2, 3, 4 and 5 to the methodological assumptions which underlie those estimates..

Robert Key: With this it will be convenient to discuss the following: amendment 25, in clause 6, page 3, line 13, at end insert
(f) How poverty among children who are not included in household surveys is to be assessed..
Amendment 26, in clause 6, page 3, line 13, at end insert
(f) How the statistical surveys used to calculate poverty rates are to be re-weighted to reflect under-reporting of specified groups..

Steve Webb: I apologise to the Committee if it might be thinking that we are entering what might be regarded as a slightly anoraky phase in our discussions, but what the heck? The three amendments are all fairly self-explanatory, so I will not dwell on them at length. They raise three separate issues. Clearly, as amendment 24 points out, we have four different definitions of poverty, but each of them involves some very complex assumptions. For example, let us consider our discussions this morning about the 21 things it takes not to be materially deprived, and recognise that they are all given a weight. We then draw a line of 25 against that, and people are poor if they are above it, but not if they are below it. The fact that that has to be combined by 70 per cent. of median income on a certain equivalent scale and a certain definition of treatment for housing shows us that the whole thing is built on a mass of assumptions and methodological decisions. I do not doubt for a second that the statisticians who put such things together do so in good faith, but they will know far better than I do that the assumptions we make determine the number we get at the end.
Some of the assumptions might be entirely marginal and mild, but others might have a huge impact on the numbers that result. Such action therefore ends up not being a statistical point, but a real one. If we choose a definition that gives us half a million more children in poverty than another definition, the price tag attached to that probably runs into billions of pounds. We therefore have to be confident that the number we are looking at is not a figure within a very broad range that could have come out differently for a couple of assumptions that might be entirely reasonable. We do not necessarily want to take such action each year, but for the base year figures, we might need to see more evidence of the impact of the key assumptions on the numbers.
To give one example, as the Minister said, the statistics can be adjusted for household size in several different ways. The Department has traditionally used the McClements equivalence scale and now it proposes to use the OECD scale. To give the Government credit, they have thereby increased the child poverty numbers by a few hundred thousand. So they have not done this out of malign intent; they have made their job more difficult by that assumption. I only know that because there is a table in one of the documents to show the impact of that assumption.
That is just one of a very large number of assumptions. It would help if we knew where the numbers are coming from, how sensitive they are to the assumptions that have been made and how much of a mountain we are being asked to climb because of a particular set of assumptions. We need to know which are key and how much impact they have had. Amendment 24 simply requires the publication of this sort of sensitivity analysis. To some extent this sort of thing goes on anyway. The Household Below Average Income figures used to do a bit of this from time to time. Given the pivotal importance of these statistical measures for the future, some initial grounding for these measures would help our scrutiny.
Amendment 25 came up in our evidence sessions and we made some progress on that issue, but it is worth remembering that these figures for children in poverty are based on surveys of private households. People go out, knock on doors and sit in peoples front rooms with a laptop. That is essentially how these data are collectedor it certainly was when I went out with one of these surveyors, although not in the emotional sense. We sat in someones front room. There are an awful lot of children who will not be identified through that method.
We have talked about children in local authority care. The Ministers response was, Yes, but they are not poor. The local authority ensures that they are not poor, but they may be deprived. If we are only interested in income poverty, fair enough, but if we are interested in some slightly broader concept of child welfarewithout going all the way through our earlier discussionswe need to know what is going on with those children. Some of them will be permanently in care, but many will be transitorily in care and coming from poor households and going to poor households. How will they be picked up? The briefings we have had mention children in the criminal justice system, young offenders institutions and all the rest of it. Again, at that point they are being fed, clothed and housed so they are not poor, but if we are interested in children thriving and prospering, they are being missed out.
Some of the children of Gypsy and Traveller families, in theory, could end up in these surveys. I am thinking of Traveller sites in my constituency that are run by the local authority and that would count as private households in the sampling frame for the surveys. I am not surethey have a postcode so that is probably all it takes. We are not excluding all Gypsy and Traveller children, but we are excluding those who live the most transient lifestyles, and we know that Gypsy and Traveller parents have low life expectancies and various other social problems. That would be true of their children too.
There is an issue about being exhaustive regarding who is missing. Let us be clear which of the nations children we are not including, and which of those we might have some concerns about. Is there any way we can either graft them into the statistics or have some auxiliary reporting, so we do not forget them? The risk is that we end up with the old target problem we talked about earlier: most of the nations children are in the figures, so those are the ones we focus on; there is no point helping Gypsy children because they are not in the figures. I do not suppose that any Government would be callous enough to do that explicitly, but if they are under legal pressure to hit a target that includes one set of children and omits another, we can see how that could happen.
Amendment 26 is about the fact that all these statistics are based on sample surveys. We are grossing up from perhaps 25,000 households in a survey to a population of some 25 million households. If a certain sort of household is less likely to respond to a survey than another, something has to be done. Who is less likely to respond? People in urban areas are less likely to respond, as are members of ethnic minorities, people who do not have English as a first language, the very elderly and so on. Clearly, we need to correct for those biases. To be fair to the Government, they do try to do that. They re-weight the survey so that if, for example, there is one very elderly person from an ethnic minority living in urban London, they get a bigger weight when the statistics are created.
However, I am not convinced that the grossing processthe re-weighting processpicks up adequately the under-reporting of children who are most likely to be in poverty. The serious point is that the current poverty numbers might be too low because some of the things not adequately weighted for are correlated with higher risk of child poverty. For example, I believe there is a regional weighting but not an inner-London weighting. I am open to correction but that is my understanding. If one thinks child poverty is higher in inner London but the weighting is only for London as a wholewith Twickenham gaining as much weight as Southwark, for exampleone does not get the right figure for child poverty. I wonder what analysis the Minister has undertaken of the risk of not responding to a survey, and the correlation between that risk and the risk of child poverty.
I have one further question before I draw my remarks to a close. The Households Below Average Income statistical appendix describes the way in which the sample is weighted to achieve the population total. It says:
In order to reconcile control variables at different levels
these are the true totals
and estimate their joint population
an example would be old people living in the north for whom English is a second language; in other words, a combination of such factors
software...provided by the French National Statistics Institute has been used. This software works by iterating towards an optimal solution that, given the particular control totals, minimises the range...of the grossing factors chosen.
I am sure that that is true, but does it worry the Minister that in a sense, one ends up forcing the sample one has to match a whole grid of national population characteristics through a quite complex statistical forcing mechanism that tries to get the numbers right, but which may not represent what is going on in the world? In other words, one can have solutions that give very big weights to a particular household in a sample because it gets the numbers rightit gets the totals and the cross-tabs rightbut one ends up with some odd results by giving hefty weights to particular sample members and low weights to others. It makes me uneasy that something we are going to spend tens of millions of pounds of public money on and debate at great length is based on an obscure statistical process that I am not sure has ever been demonstrated not to distort the data a bit too much. It gets the totals right and we are all happy about that, but do we know how robust the process is? That is my concern. I think the Minister has a higher mathematics degree, so he knows exactly what I am talking about and I hope he will run the Committee through the process.
All that probably sounds a bit technical but if we do not get these things right, they will have very big, real implications. Yes, it is real people we are talking about, but if we get the numbers a few hundred thousand out one way or another, the policy implications could be very serious. We need to have the information to hand to appraise the statistics we are being given, and that is the purpose of the amendments.

Andrew Selous: It is not the first time this afternoon that the background of the hon. Member for Northavon as an academic in the social sciences has come to the fore to the benefit of the Committee. The hon. Gentleman, with the three amendments, is seeking clarity and transparency so that we know what we are talking about, so that these things are not hidden away in footnotes in HBAI tables, which are perhaps not readily available and understood. The amendments call for
an analysis of the sensitivity...to the methodological assumptions
and request information about how poverty is to be assessed and how under-reporting in response to surveys is to be dealt with. If the hon. Gentleman is looking to press the amendments to a vote, I would be minded to ask my colleagues to support him because I think clarity and transparency are to be welcomed, so that we know exactly the basis on which we are proceeding.
There is one group that the hon. Gentleman has not mentioned. He has mentioned children in local authority care, as well as Gypsies and Travellers, on whom we had some discussion, but I am not entirely clear about the position of the children of asylum seekers, or whether they are included. In the northern part of Bedfordshire, not in my constituency, we have the Yarls Wood detention centre. Will that be surveyed, and will all this be part of it? We need to be absolutely clear about which children we are and are not talking about. We might have a legitimate argument about whether some children should not be included for a particular reason, but I would be grateful if the Minister gave us some clarity about what the targets are based on.

Sally Keeble: I want to ask a little about qualifying households, net household incomes and deductions. I share others concerns about what happens to Gypsy and Traveller children, the children of asylum seekers and children whose immigration status is unclear. There is a clear distinction between vulnerability and poverty. The two might overlap, but this is about poverty. Children in the care system who have issues of vulnerability will come under the scope of different legislation and might not necessarily be the same as children who live in poverty. I would therefore like us to focus on children who live in the community rather than children who live in institutions. Somewhere such as Yarls Wood might not be quite the place to look for such children, because it is a residential, institutional setting, where they will be for only a certain amount of time. I am more concerned about children whose asylum claim has been turned down, for whom there can be some to-ing and fro-ing. As we all know, such cases can go on for years, at the end of which the childrens status might still be unresolved. If their parent cannot get benefits and cannot work, their poverty is acute and their housing is often pretty atrocious.
The same applies to Traveller children who might be centred around one address but who might travel around quite a lot and therefore do not come under the scope of any particular survey. The hon. Member for Northavon has made this point. I would not support the amendment because such children probably could not be included under any survey, partly because they are not static for long enoughespecially Traveller children, whose families may still be quite mobile. Also, such children might not be very willing to come forward, especially if they are without immigration status, and it can be very hard to pin them down. I suspect that virtually 100 per cent. of children in those groups will be living in poverty, and I should like to know what other measures my right hon. Friend the Minister is taking to deal with poverty in those groups.
Finally, on net incomes, if one looks at poverty figures after housing costs are taken out, they are much more acute because of problems with housing costs. What is the Ministers thinking about ensuring that housing costs do not push families into complete poverty?

Julie Morgan: The hon. Member for Northavon has made some important points through his amendments, and I am sure that he is right that certain groups will not be included in any household surveys. I am particularly concerned about the two groups that my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, North has just mentionedGypsy and Traveller children and asylum-seeking children. I know that it is extremely difficult to get information about Gypsy and Traveller households, but it is very important that they are taken account of in such surveys and calculations. As the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Gypsy and Traveller law reform, I have had extensive meetings with the census people about getting Gypsies and Travellers registered on the census. There is a huge effort going on to try and get those people registered on the census, by working in liaison with Gypsies and Travellers, trying to identify caravans, and through word of mouth in different areas. I hope that we will get a certain number of Gypsy and Traveller families on to the census, but it is extremely unlikely that they will ever show up in regular household surveys. Gypsy and Traveller children are some of the most deprived children in the land. There is not much financial information about them, but we know that they lose out in lists of material deprivation, particularly if they are moving around and not on local authority sites.
When the Minister responds, will he state what particular efforts will be made to include Gypsy and Traveller children in the Bill? We know that the income received by asylum-seeking families is below what is needed to live in the way that the rest of the country lives, and we know that those children are particularly vulnerable. I would be interested to hear what measures will be taken to help that group of children.

Stephen Timms: Clause 6 enables a number of technical terms underpinning the child poverty targets in the previous clauses to be defined in regulations. I believe that a draft of those regulations was provided to members of the Committee last week, and they are subject to the affirmative procedure. I will follow the hon. Member for Northavon and speak to each amendment in turn.
Amendment 24 would add a discretionary regulation-making power to clause 6, requiring analysis of the sensitivity of child poverty statistics under the four targets in the Bill, and for the methodological assumptions underlying those statistics to be set out in the regulations. There are already provisions in the Bill that ensure that the underlying methodology used to calculate those statistics is robust and in line with accepted statistical practice. Clause 14(2) requires that the statistics used to measure progress on the four targets are national statistics. That means that they must adhere to the code of practice produced by the Statistics Board. That code states that producers will endeavour to ensure that methods used to produce national statistics are objectively chosen and based on sound statistical methods. It also states that quality measures must be regularly published to enable users to assess whether the statistics are fit for purpose.
The Households below average income series, where our child poverty figures are currently published, already includes information documenting the underlying assumptions. It presents statistics for a range of child poverty thresholds, both before and after housing costs have been deducted, and the figures on both are published. It provides a comparison with the modified OECD and McClements equivalence scale that was mentioned, which is used to adjust incomes for household size and composition. It also gives the confidence intervals for the number of children in relatively low-income households, which provides an indication of the measures precision. It might be helpful for me to make it clear that we expect all this information to be included in future editions of the publication.
Amendment 25 enables the Secretary of State to make regulations setting out how poverty should be measured for children who are not covered by the surveys, and I have listened with interest to the points raised by a number of hon. Members on that matter. The amendment would define ways in which the poverty of those children could be assessed, but it would not explicitly require poverty levels to be monitored or reduced. I assume that the broad purpose of the amendment is to ensure that children are adequately covered by provisions in the Bill, and that concern is shared across the Committee.
The targets that we are setting will be effective only if progress towards them is measurable. They apply to children in qualifying households, which are those households included in surveys. Of course, it would be great if we could include every child, but practically speaking, my hon. Friends the Members for Northampton, North and for Cardiff, North are right. There is no way around the fact that some households will not turn up in surveys for the reasons indicated.
We have been careful to frame the Bill so that it does not exclude those children. Clause 8(2) sets out that the UK strategy needs to do two things: comply with
the duty to ensure that the targets are met;
but do so also
for the purpose of ensuring as far as possible that children in the United Kingdom do not experience socio-economic disadvantage.
That obligation on the strategy will ensure that the children we have talked about, who may well be missed out from the survey evidence, will nevertheless be beneficiaries of the Bill, because all children are covered by that provision, regardless of whether they are picked up by the surveys.

Andrew Selous: Will the Minister write a note to all members of the Committeeas has helpfully been done on two occasions so far this week, which I appreciatein respect of non-resident parents? With parents who are separated, children are perhaps spending a considerable amount of shared care time with, typically, their father, who may have a very different income. My suspicion is that the surveys are primarily, if not overwhelmingly, picking up the households in which the parent with care lives. If there is a significant degree of shared care, the surveys will not be capturing what is happening to those children for the rest of the time. The issue is probably a technical one, but a note to the Committee would be helpful.

Stephen Timms: I am happy to do that. The survey works through the random selection of postcodes, I think, so there will be no bias towards the parent with care rather than the other parent, but I am happy to provide such a note.
The main groups of children that we are talking about are Gypsy, Roma or Traveller children, children in care, children in bed-and-breakfast accommodation and asylum-seeking children. As I said, if the household does not have an address or postcode, I do not think that the surveys will pick such children up.
For asylum-seeking children, the great majority will be in households with an address or postcode, so I would expect the great majority to be included, but there is some uncertainty about precisely how many children we are talking about. A Barnardos report published last year estimated that since 2002 around 40,000 children in asylum-seeking families had arrived or been born in the UK and that there could be more than 100,000 children in total in the UK asylum system. We are certainly talking about quite a large group of children there, but the great majority will be in private households and will be picked up by the survey. Children in Yarls Wood, to take the example given by the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire, would not be picked up by the survey. For children not living in private householdschildren in Yarls Wood, for example, but children in care homes as wellthere is not really a way to allocate household income, even if they were covered by the survey. Again, I do not think that we shall find a way of including them in the target, but they will be covered by clause 8(2)(b).
Development of the child poverty strategy will involve identification of those groups of children most at risk of being in poverty, including harder-to-reach and disadvantaged groups, and measures to help them. As we discussed in the evidence sessions last week, the well-being of many children not covered by the targets is monitored by Government and local government in other ways. For example, there are outcome and well- being measures for looked-after children who live in accommodation not covered by the surveys; there are minimum statutory standards for looked-after children in residential care; and there is a Government target to reduce the number of households living in temporary accommodation, including bed-and-breakfast accommodation. Targets are in place for a number of such groups.
Amendment 26 is designed to ensure that the weighting procedures for the survey statistics take into account under-representation in the survey of particular groups. I sympathise with the intention behind the amendment, but I hope that I can persuade the hon. Member for Northavon that it is not necessary. The main survey used to calculate child poverty rates, the family resources survey, is subject to weighting procedures, which help to ensure that the survey data accurately reflect the make-up of the population. The data are weighted on a range of variables, including housing tenure and family type. The weighting regime for the survey was reviewed comprehensively in 2005 and the results are on the Department for Work and Pensions website. In addition, the methodology used to create the survey statistics has to adhere to national statistics standards for integrity, quality and freedom from political influence. That means that regular independent quality reviews of the statistics will be carried out.
The family resources survey weighting procedures do not account directly for the possible under-representation of all at-risk groups. We correct indirectly for some of the under-representation of at-risk groups by taking account of characteristics such as household tenure and family type, which are statistically related to other characteristics of at-risk groups. It is not possible to control for all at-risk characteristics. First, it is best practice to try to limit the number of control factors that underlie the weighting procedure, because too many control totals can produce misleading results. Secondly, if few households from a given group are captured by the survey because there are relatively few such households in the country, weighting procedures will be unreliable. Thirdly, we do not know enough about the populations of some groups, such as Gypsy, Traveller and Roma people, to use weighting procedures reliably, because there is no robust total to be controlled to.
I hope that I have assured the Committee that sufficient, accurate weighting procedures are in place and that they are regularly reviewed. Amendment 26 is therefore unnecessary.
To respond to my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, North, the use of income before, rather than after, the deduction of housing costs is the subject of our next debate. The main argument for using income before housing costs is to enable straightforward comparisons with other European countries, because that is how they measure it. We had an interesting discussion this morning on how we stand compared with other EU countries. We would not be able to make that comparison if we did not use income before housing costs data. However, I emphasise that we will continue to publish both measures so that everybody can see exactly what the position is.

Steve Webb: I welcome that response. I accept that there is shed loads of sensitivity stuff relating to the 60 per cent. of median income information at the back of the HBAI statistics. I am less confident that we know how robust the newer statistics are, such as those on persistent poverty and material deprivation. A huge amount of effort goes into the statistics that we have had for a long time. I seek reassurance that we will believe the newer statistics to be more robust when they are published more regularly. That is currently less pronounced.
I take the Ministers point about children not in the surveys. It is welcome that the strategies are not just about the children covered by the targets. That is reassuring, provided that it has teeth. If a hypothetical Government cut benefits for asylum seekers and the welfare of children in those households diminished, it would come under the section that he referred to. If the child poverty commission has no teeth, life will go on.

Stephen Timms: If that happened, it would be picked up by the survey because the great majority of those children are in households and will be covered like other children. It is only children in Yarls Wood, for example, who would not be picked up.

Steve Webb: That is fair. It is helpful that the Bill is not solely concerned with the target.
Finally, on under-representation, I take the Ministers point that we do not have control totals for many of the groups. The point about inner London is probably quite important. Governments notoriously cannot count how many people live in such areas and I know that it is not straightforward to do so. Given the correlation between child poverty and living in inner London, the fact that the weighting is for Greater London, not for inner and outer London, means that the headline child poverty numbers are probably too low, albeit perhaps not by muchI do not know by how much. Will the Minister look at that again?
I appreciate the seriousness with which the Minister addressed those concerns, so I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Steve Webb: I beg to move amendment 28, in clause 6, page 3, line 14, leave out subsection (2).
An audible cheer went up, Mr. Key, when we reached this substantive and important amendment. Under clause 6, the definition of income may include and exclude all sorts of things, but the one thing that cannot be deducted is the cost of housing. That is explicitly prohibited by the Bill. Amendment 28 would remove that prohibition and allow the child poverty commission, when drawing up the measure of poverty to target, to consider taking housing costs off. That is all it would do. It would not even oblige the commission to do so; it would just let it think about doing so.
What difference would that make? According to the latest figures, on the before-housing costs measure, 2.9 million children are living in poverty, and on the after-housing costs measure, 4 million are. The difference is huge, and the amendment goes to the nub of the issue. There are arguments for and against, and they have, conveniently, been published at the back of the document on households on lower incomes. The argument for not taking off housing costs is that if someone spends more on housing because they buy a plusher, nicer, more luxurious place, that is their choice and the cost should not be deducted because it makes their life better. If housing costs are just a proxy for quality, we should not knock them off; however, they are a real measure of need that cannot be avoided and are different in different parts of the country, so they should be knocked off.
The Minister generously told us what his answer would be when he said during the previous debate that the key argument for using the before-housing costs measure is that that is what everyone else does, so we can make international comparisons. However, no one said that we should not publish before-housing costs measures; no one said that we should not be able to compare internationally by continuing to generate before-housing costs numbers. Surely the Bill should be about the best interests of British children and should be the right target for the welfare of children in this country. The ability to make comparisons with other countries should be a secondary consideration, but we can do that anyway. Using an after-housing costs measure does not preclude international comparisons because we will calculate the numbers anywayall that is involved is two sets of figures, one of which has housing costs knocked off. There is not even any extra effort involved.
The question is: which is the best measure of real living standards? There is a strong London dimension, as the Minister will appreciate, because average housing costs in the capital are substantially greater than elsewhere. Most people would not think that that is because of quality. People who pay high rents for overcrowded rented accommodation in central London are not having a whale of a time; they just have to find the money. Deducting the cost of housing seems to be particularly appropriate in areas where child poverty might be concentratedfor example, urban areas.
A further reason why the before-housing costs measure is not the right one to use is that, perversely, it includes housing benefit. If I lived in the same house, year after year, and rents, whether council, housing association or private, rose faster than inflation, I would be better off on the measure that the Bill proposes to use because my housing benefit would go up. How can that be right?
I hesitate to mention that a third measure is knocking around, which I have just remembered. The Johnson-Webb measure was proposed in an economists academic paper a while ago. It suggested that an alternative is to exclude both housing benefit and housing costs. If including housing benefit in income is a problem because it goes up when rent goes up, which makes no sense, and knocking off housing costs is not perfect because it might reflect quality, one could use a statistic that includes neither, and perhaps bring in housing in another way, perhaps in material deprivation.
There are variations, but the key point is that both sets of figuresbefore-housing costs and after-housing costswill be published. That has been the case for years, and should continue. We are not precluding putting that information in the public domain, but what should future Governments be targeting?

Graham Stuart: The hon. Gentleman makes an extremely powerful case. May I take him back to his point about international comparisons? Is it true that because of the shortage of houses and problems with housing in this countryI will not rehash this mornings debatewe have a particular problem with the cost of housing for those on low incomes?

Steve Webb: Certainly, the British housing market is very different from everywhere else in western Europe. Housing impacts on peoples living standards in this country in a very particular way. It is entirely legitimate to look across Europe on a harmonised definitionI have no problem with thatbut if we want to know what is happening to peoples real living standards, it does not seem right simply to ignore their housing. I have said all that I need to say on that point, and I hope that the Committee will support the amendment.

Andrew Selous: The Minister gave us an early glimpse of what he was going to say in his response to the previous group of amendments. I recognise that we need to have a measure of poverty that we can use to draw comparisons with other EU countries. Indeed, we had that debate this morning, which was necessary. The hon. Member for Northavon and my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness are right to point out that the after-housing costs measure is probably what families focus on. They want to know how much they have to live on to cover food, clothing, heat and so on once they have paid for their accommodation. I accept what the hon. Member for Northavon says in that respect. We know that both sets of figures will be published. They will be available and child poverty lobby groups will draw attention to both sets, and particularly to the after-housing costs set.
I will listen with interest to what the Minister says. The hon. Member for Northavon makes a valid point when he says that his amendment is permissive rather than prescriptive. It would not require anything to be done; it would merely remove a prohibition from clause 6. On that basis, I think that the case for his amendment is persuasive, but I will listen to hear if the Minister has any especially good arguments up his sleeve for why we should leave the clause as it is.

Stephen Timms: Unfortunately, my briefing does not cover the Webb-Johnson methodology so, sadly, it will be neglected in my response.
The Committee has heard what the amendment would do. We have used a before-housing costs measure of child poverty since the consultation on measuring child poverty in 2003 but, as I have already emphasised, the households below average income data series continues to present child poverty estimates using both before and after-housing costs measures of poverty, and our intention is for that to continue.
I have mentioned one of my reasons to the Committee, but there is another. The most telling consideration is that income is measured before housing costs to allow comparisons with other European countries, which measure poverty in that way. There is a dynamic in the Bill that we aim to be among the best in Europe. The target that we have set for relative poverty would place us as the best in Europe at the moment. In setting the targetsclause 6 is about interpretation of terms used in relation to targetswe should use the before-housing cost measure to enable those comparisons to be made and for us to have a sense of whether or not we are achieving a position of being the best in Europe. The hon. Member for Northavon said that we could still look at that data. However, I turn that round. We will still be able to see the after-housing cost data and make whatever use of them we wish, but in terms of the target, it is right that we compile the figures in a way that can be compared with others.
As we all know from this mornings debate, measures of housing quality are included in the combined low income and material deprivation measure. If a child is experiencing poor housing, that will be reflected in their material deprivation score. Families who cannot afford things because they have high housing costs will be picked up in the material deprivation measure as well. The measure reflects the impact of high housing costs and a familys ability to afford decent housing. The hon. Member for Northavon is right about the impact of high housing costs on child povertymy hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North frequently makes that point. Through the low income and material deprivation measures, we are able to track that impact because paying out a lot of money for housing curtails the ability to afford other things.
Finally, as the hon. Member for Northavon mentioned, if one deducts housing costs entirely, those who choose to pay for better quality accommodation could have their relative standard of living understated. In preparing a UK child poverty strategy, we need to consider any housing measures required to tackle child poverty, as set out in clause 8. It is right that the targets are defined as being before housing costs, for the reasons that I have set out, but people will continue to monitor what is happening on an after-housing costs basis and the data will continue to be provided to make that possible.

Steve Webb: I am not sure that I am convinced by that. The Minister seems to be saying, Well, dont worry about knocking off housing costs, because well pick it up some other way. Well pick it up through deprivation, so if people have high housing costs, the children wont be able to go on holiday or have a new pair of shoes. That is a pretty indirect way of picking it up, and you would not be able to disentangle the housing impact from another impact. The family might not be able to go on holiday because of other costs, so that would not identify the impact of housing uniquely. I take the Ministers point that the after-housing costs numbers will still be published, but targets matteras his motto would be. If one targets income before housing costs, there is not the same policy impetus to tackle the housing costs of low-income households, as the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire pointed out. If income after housing costs is targeted, tackling such housing costs becomes a much more explicit policy objective because the Government will be held to account for it. What we target matters.
I am also concerned that the Minister wants to pre-empt the child poverty commissionhe has great faith in it and is going to stuff it with expertsfrom even thinking about housing. I cannot see why he would want to stop the commission from at least looking at whether, on balance, taking off housing costs gives a better guide.

Andrew Selous: I apologise for interrupting the hon. Gentlemans flow. Were his amendment to be accepted, what would be his intention for the targets in clauses 2 to 5? What would be the practical effect of the amendment? He talked about it having a permissive characterby allowing the child poverty commission to do different thingsbut what does he intend to change in the targets in clauses 2 to 5.

Steve Webb: If we are going to create a child poverty commission, the commission should be asked. Clause 6 is about the Secretary of State making regulations, presumably on the basis of expert advice. Therefore, the child poverty commission, when deciding all the details, should be asked whether deducting housing costs is the right thing to do. It would then either reaffirm the exact targets as they stand just after housing costs, or come up with different thresholds on the basis that a slightly different thing is being measured. I have a view on what the right answer is, but that is just my opinion. There is a strong argument that what is being precluded is worth looking at, so we should not pre-empt the commission and stop it from looking. I am not saying that it should look at everything, but housing costs are so fundamental and central to peoples real living standards that the commission should be able to assess whether they should be in the target.

Stephen Timms: May I press the hon. Gentleman a little on his point about constraining the commission? The clause specifies what can be in the targets. The child poverty commission might want to look at a range of matters, but it is right that the set target should be a before-housing costs target to make comparisons with other countries.

Steve Webb: We do not need a child poverty Bill with a legally binding target to make comparisons with other countrieswe can do that anyway. I do not see that anything I am proposing prevents that from being done. The question is: what should we target? Clause 6(1)(c) states that regulations may provide for what is to be regarded as income, and all I am saying is that the child poverty commission should be able to advise the Secretary of State that, as the Bill stands, it cannot take off housing costs, but that it would be a better measure of living standards if it did.

Graham Stuart: The current position is that the after-housing costs numbers are published. The Ministers main argument seems to rest on our targets having to correspond with the international comparison numbers. Surely, if it is better for this country to use after-housing costs for our target in statute, that is what we should have. We would still publish the before-housing costs numbers, which would allow the international comparisons to be made. We would have all the information we needed, and a target that best suited the countrys needs. I do not think that the Minister has really addressed that central point.

Steve Webb: I could not have put it better. On that basis, I commend the amendment to the Committee.

Question put, That the amendment be made.

The Committee divided: Ayes 7, Noes 9.

Question accordingly negatived.

Steve Webb: I beg to move amendment 27, in clause 6, page 3, line 18, at end add:
and the costs associated with disability..
I should alert you, Mr. Key, to the fact that my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, West will also seek to catch your eye on the amendment. You have probably heard enough of me, but the treatment of disability is an important issue. As we discussed in the evidence sessions, people receiving certain disability benefits to reflect additional costs may have a perverse effect on the statistics as they are currently constructed. The living standard of those people is measured by their income, which includes the benefit they get because they have extra costs, but nowhere are those costs taken into account. Those people, therefore, appear higher up the income and living standards scales than they truly are. Their promotion up the ranking is artificial, because all the benefit does is make good the costs that non-disabled households do not face.
We simply suggest that account be taken of the costs associated with disability, and in a particular way. There are two obvious ways of taking account of disability benefits. One is to exclude them. I am grateful that the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, in following up a question I asked in a previous Committee sitting, has supplied us with a briefing note on the impact of excluding disability benefits from the HBAI measure. In parentheses, the note suggests that five topics are covered, but marginal deduction rates do not appear anywhere in it, so I hope we can have the missing section at some point.
The analysis shows that the aggregate number of those in poverty is pretty much the same whether or not disability living allowance is excluded. The totals are not affected. I am grateful for that useful information. However, we were getting at the composition, not the totals. The commentary on the numbers precisely states that if DLA is taken out, the median income is reduced, and therefore a set of children goes out of the figures. Presumably, they are children in households where nobody is disabled. However, there is presumably another set of children who will come into the figureschildren in households where there is a disabled person. Although the total may be the same, the composition may be different. I do not think we yet have information about the composition.
If one is trying to measure relative living standards, excluding DLA is closer to the truth. One argument for excluding DLA is that we would get the right children. The total may not be different, but we would include more children in households with a disabled person than we do on the current definition, and the policy response may therefore be different. That all sounds like nerdy statistical stuff, but the point is that if our poverty figures include more children in households where there is someone with a disability, we will do more about disabilityit follows. We need to get the right people in the figures, and not just the right totals. Therefore, there is a case for excluding DLA.
The ministerial comment on the Governments figures stated that if we excluded DLA and then had a take-up campaignso that more people received DLAit would not show in the figures. That would be a bit odd, as clearly the Government have done something about poverty and it would not be fair if that did not show in the figures. I can see the logic, but our amendment proposes to tackle the issue in a slightly different way.
We have linked amendment 27 to the process of equivalisation. At the moment, we do not quite say that in a household two people can live as cheaply as one, but rather that a second mouth does not take twice as much as the first one, so there is a scaling. We take the total household income and scale according to the number of mouths to feed, the ages and all the rest of it to get an equivalent incometo scale households with different costs. We are arguing that we should have the same process for disability. Hence, rather than exclude a piece of income that someone is getting, which is one way of doing it, when we scale different households to reflect their different costs, we recognise that households with a disabled person have additional costs. They should have a higher equivalence scale, so that we compare like with like.
I recognise that that raises complications. The equivalence scale that the Government are using in their proposed figures is incredibly crudethe OECD scale is gobsmackingly crude compared with the one the Government used formerly, which was much more refined and based on real living standards. I accept that it may be difficult to graft the costs of disability on to the OECD scale, which is horrifying in its simplicity. But we have to do something. Otherwise, the wrong children will be classified as in poverty and we will have the wrong policy response. Either we knock the income out or we take account of the costs. It is not good enough simply to say that we cannot do anything and we will just put up with figures that do not include children who are in poverty when they should be included, and vice-versa. I shall be grateful for the Ministers response on how we can address the proper measurement of living standards of children in households with a disabled adult.

Andrew Selous: Members might remember that this was a point on which I questioned the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions during our evidence sessions last week. I think the hon. Member for Northavon has made his points well. Disability living allowance is given to offset the increased costs of disability, which are many and varied, depending on the disability. Certain types of product may need to be bought to cope with the disability, and there may be increased heating costs, extra transport costs, as public transport is not suitable, or specialised child care costs. The issue will become larger as individual budgets start to loom on the horizon.
I, too, looked at the note we had from Ministers yesterday evening. I will be grateful if the Financial Secretary can explain something that appears curious. We were told that 23 per cent. of children were in households with below 60 per cent. of median income, with DLA and attendance allowance included as income. We were then given the figure for children in households with below 60 per cent. of median income, but excluding those allowances as income. The figure actually fell by only 1 per cent. to 22 per cent., which is slightly counter-intuitive, unless I am missing something. It tends to suggest that DLA is being taken up by slightly wealthier families, and that we have a problem with take-up at the lower end of the income scale. Those figures certainly are not what I expected, and I am left rather puzzled from a policy perspective, as to what that tells us and what we should do about it.
It is really a question of being honest. I hate to use that word, and I do not imply anything negative by it, but we have to reflect the reality of peoples lives. If income is given to cope with specific extra costs, one cannot really count it as ordinary income in the way that people who are not disabled would count additional income. That should be a given across the board; it is not a party political point, but a statement of the reality of the situation. I look forward to hearing what the Financial Secretary has to say.

John Barrett: My hon. Friend the Member for Northavon does not often leave his colleagues with much to say on such issues, so I feel like an apprentice with the master by his side.
One group of people who have been very keen on the Bill are those with a disabled child or a disabled parent in the family, because they realise that the move towards the targets will have a great impact on them. As has been mentioned, it is vital that increased costs for heating, diet, transport or child care are recognised as additional costs on the family, and that additional income from DLA or other sources should not be seen as disposable income that the family will be left with. When we consider clause 6(c), which concerns
what is to be regarded as the income of a household,
and when we consider what deductions are to be made, it makes perfect sense to consider the costs and the deductions that have to be made to put a family on a level playing field with all the other families who do not have a disabled person in the house. My hon. Friends amendment therefore makes perfect sense.

Stephen Timms: Equivalising incomes to take account of the costs of disability is tricky, and we discussed the issue in last weeks evidence sessions. I am not sure whether the hon. Member for Northavon was proposing a methodology for doing thatif so, I should be interested to know a bit morebut it is certainly a difficult issue and there is no consensus on how it should be done.
Last week, we were asked whether it is possible to determine the impact on child poverty levels of not counting DLA as income. My hon. Friend the Under-Secretary then quickly produced the letter that has been mentioned. As we have heard, the figures show that there is almost no difference in the number and percentage of children who are counted as being in relative poverty using income figures that include, and exclude, DLA and attendance allowance. The hon. Member for Northavon explained why that was, but let me express it slightly differently.
Excluding DLA and attendance allowance from household income would reduce median household income. Attendance allowance and DLA are more likely to be received by families without children. There are, as the hon. Member for Edinburgh, West has rightly pointed out, families with children who receive DLA for those children. On the whole, however, it is more likely to be received by older people who are under state pension age and who do not have children, or whose children have grown up, whereas attendance allowance is more likely to be received by pensioner households. The effect of taking those components of income away would be to improve the relative position of households with children in the income distribution, because fewer households with children would have had their incomes reduced, and to worsen the position of pensioners, as a higher number of households incomes would have been reduced. That is another way of looking at the issue.
It is also worth noting that the households below average income series, where our child poverty statistics are published, is carefully reviewed. As national statistics, they have to be. The most recent review, in 2004, which is on the Department for Work and Pensions research website, addressed the issue of the extra costs of disability and how disability benefits should be treated. The review recognised that disability benefit recipients position in the income distribution figures is quite high. That might be a poor representation of their standard of living, but the review concluded that removing disability benefits from income would not be the solution, as it would not reflect any changes over time in the receipt of those benefits, and would then overstate the living standards of non-recipients who had extra costs.
There clearly are additional costs associated with disability but, as the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire rightly pointed out, they vary significantly in level and nature between individuals. There is no general agreement on how to measure them, at least not yet, so there is no generally agreed method to equivalise income to take account of those costs. My hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions made the point in the evidence sessions last week that this does not mean that the extra costs of disability are not picked up by the measures in the Bill.
Once again the combined low income and material deprivation indicator comes to our aid. It allows a fuller assessment of the living assessment of those households facing particular difficulties due to high living costs such as the cost of disability because they will then have less disposable income available to meet other needs. That indicator will capture families who have an income that is higher than that captured by the relative low income target, but who still have a lower standard of living because they have additional costs related to disability or other additional costs to bear.
In developing the child poverty strategy, we will consider the evidence on which groups are likely to be most vulnerable to poverty and what measures are needed to meet their needs. Those groups are likely to include children in families with a disabled family member. The variable nature of the costs associated with disability make it difficult to equivalise income to take into account the costs of disability in the way proposed by the amendment. The hon. Gentleman has once again raised an important point. I am grateful to him for doing so but I hope that he will accept that his amendment does not give us a solution to the challenge here.

Steve Webb: If the amendment prompted the Department to do more work on the costs and impact of disability to assess the adequacy and coverage of disability benefit levels, that of itself would make it worthwhile. I accept that there is not a straightforward way of doing this and perhaps the work required to do it might delay the whole process, which we do not want. I notice the Minister again relies on the argument that the material deprivation indicator would pick this up. It is going to pick up disability costs and housing costs so it will take quite a fine statistician to work out what is going on in this catch-all. We need to pick these things up a bit more directly. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Clause 6 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 7

The Child Poverty Commission

Steve Webb: I beg to move amendment 48, in clause 7, page 3, leave out lines 29 to 32.
I had not planned to table the amendment, as is apparent from the numbering, but the subject arose during the evidence sessions. The amendment would remove the part of clause 7 that provides for the child poverty commission to be abolished. I must admit that I had not noticed that, which is why I had not tabled an amendment on the subject, but when we were looking at the Bill and discussing it, I suddenly realised that it gives the Secretary of State power to abolish the commission. On the face of it, that might seem reasonable: one could argue that we do not want a plethora of quangos and that once it has served its useful purpose, the commission should drift off into the sunset.
I do not think it is quite as simple as that. Tackling child poverty is a bit like running up a down escalator. If we do not do very much, we end up going backwards. We had a discussion this morning about poverty rates in Europe and it was noticeable that in all sorts of different countries with different Governments of different complexions and different social environments, overall child poverty rates are going up because there are global forces at work. Globalisation has implications for the wage structure. There are social changes going on across Europe. There are forces at work which tend to lead to greater inequality and greater child poverty. I therefore find it hard to believe that, even if we reach that happy day in 2022, for example, when we decide that the 2020 target has been met, we are not then going to want to have some sort of infrastructure for not taking our foot off the pedal at that point.
The Minister saidI paraphrase ever so slightlythat it is all very well the Finns getting 5 per cent. for a few years, but they could not keep it up, could they? Likewise, if the United Kingdom happened to reach the 10 per cent. target and so on in 2020, that is marvellous compared with where we are now, but could we keep it up and sustain it? What happens beyond the end of that period? Given that the child poverty commission is not some sprawling bureaucracy that is going to leach vast amounts of taxpayers money£180,000 a year or whatever, for four meetings a year and some biscuitsit does not seem to be unduly onerous for it to have a rolling role, just as the Committee on Climate Change will go on until 2050. In other words, the bit of clause 7 that we are trying to delete makes the assumption that child poverty will be fixed somehowthat will be a box that we can tick, and we would not even have the slightest overseeing, reporting mechanism that the child poverty commission would provide.
I would like to see the child poverty commission kept going post-2020not just because it provides jobs for academics. It is said that the poor are always with us, so we cannot afford to take our foot off the pedal. We need a body that is always there to prod and to probe on child poverty so, with the amendment, I would like to remove the ability of a future Secretary of State to abolish the child poverty commission.

David Gauke: May I say for the first time today, Mr. Key, what a pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship?
I rise to make a couple of brief points. First, the amendment raises an interesting question. As the hon. Member for Northavon said, we could see the Bill as being about achieving the 2020 target and, clearly, the child poverty commission has a role in that. Once that target is achieved, assuming that it is, what then is the ongoing role for the child poverty commission? Is there an argument for it to be abolished? We do not believe that quangos should exist for the sake of it. We are interested to hear what the Minister has to say about that and about his defence of the Secretary of States ability to abolish the commission.
My second point is a technical one, which is that the amendment does not do all that it should do. It proposes the removal of clause 7(4), but subsections (5) and (6) should also be struck out. For that reason, if the hon. Gentleman intended to press the amendment to a Division, we could not support it. However, an interesting point is being made and we would be grateful to hear the Ministers views.

Helen Goodman: It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Mr. Key.
The effect of the amendment would be to take from the Bill an order-making power, subject to the affirmative procedure, for a future Government to wind up the commission once its work is complete. I understand that the hon. Member for Northavon has concerns about how the power might be used. He would like to see a continuing role for the commission after the target date of 2020. I would like to reassure hon. Members that the power is in the Bill simply to avoid a future Government finding itself with a statutory public body that has completed its work but remains in existence because there is no ready means to bring it to an end.
I am grateful to the hon. Member for South-West Hertfordshire for pointing out the technical deficiencies in the amendment. I was hoping that the hon. Gentleman would tell us what Mrs. Gauke thought, but he has not done so on this occasion.
Clause 7(4)(b) clearly states that the power can only be used on a date falling after the target year. Furthermore, the explanatory notes clearly state that it is the Governments intention to use the power only if they consider that there is no longer a role for the commission.
As we have stated before, the order-making power is subject to the affirmative procedure, which means that a future Government would need to demonstrate to Parliament that there was no longer a role for the commission. It would clearly not be appropriate to wind down the commission if the targets had not been met. All Members know that constraints on Government spending will continue into the next decade. In that context, continuing to fund a public body that has no remit after the target year would not be a sensible use of public funds.
I understand the concern expressed by the hon. Member for Northavon that the targets could be breached after 2020. However, schedule 2 places a duty on the Government to ensure that targets are met beyond the target year; if breached, it would require regulations to be made setting out the steps to meet them again. Paragraph 6 of schedule 2 allows regulations to be made after 2020 relating to the provision of advice by the commission. The Bill therefore envisages that the commission will continue to play a role after 2020, if it is considered that it can still add value.
Having pointed out the back-stop position given in schedule 2, I hope that I have satisfied the hon. Gentlemans concern and that he will withdraw the amendment.

Steve Webb: Having established that we need the child poverty commission to keep an eye on Government, I cannot envisage a world in which we went forward without it because we had achieved our targets. It is not clear who will be reporting post-2020 if the commission has gone and we have been meeting our targets. Who will be keeping an eye on those targets and ensuring that they are met? I assume that the Department will publish statistics, but who is to report on why the targets have not been met? That is what the commission will be doing pre-2020.

Helen Goodman: I am sure that the hon. Gentleman understands that responsibility for meeting the targets and reporting on them lies with the Secretary of State. It is the commissions responsibility to advise the Secretary of State. There will be no question about it: the Department will continue to oversee the policy.

Steve Webb: I am trying to make the point that if a Government need advising pre-2020, why should a post-2020 Government not need advice? They may have hit a target, but it does not mean that they do not need advice. I am reassured that schedule 2 provides for the post-2020 world. I would be tempted to remove subsection (4) and leave the Government to remove subsections (5) and (6) in order to tidy things up. However, given the context of our discussions, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.

John Howell: This will be my second attempt to get some definition of how the Minister envisages the commission working in practice. A number of visions of how it would work were set out in witness statements and the memorandums that accompanied them. Save the Children saw it playing a strong role, active in driving the strategy forward, whereas others saw it playing a lesser role.
Both Ministers were at the Work and Pensions Committee hearing on 17 June, but we heard a rather uncertain view of the commission from them. We were told that it would be an advisory body. We were told that it would not set targets, but that that would be an important task for Government and for Parliament. We were told that it would be a high-profile organisation. However, all those views were extremely general and gave no substance to the circumstances in which Ministers envisaged it being used. It is great that, according to the Minister, it will have a budget for researchbut research for what and on what occasions?

Helen Goodman: I am sorry if it is not clear to the hon. Gentleman, but the commissions role is to advise the Secretary of State. The commission will do that by considering the Governments position in relation to meeting the targets, and it will consider the sort of content needed for a credible strategy to meet the targets. It will advise the Secretary of State and its advice will be published. Obviously, the commission will meet regularlyit is not intended that it should be called together only in exceptional or unusual circumstances. It is intended that it should maintain a watching brief throughout the period to 2020.

John Howell: There is a huge difference between a body that provides advice when asked for it by the Secretary of State, and a body that provides advice on its own initiative. Which will the commission be?

Helen Goodman: The duty to provide advice is set out in the Bill, and it will be the Secretary of States duty to take account of the advice and to show that it has been taken into account. I am sorry, but I cannot understand why that is not clear to the hon. Gentleman. The duties are laid out, and the commission will fulfil its duties.

John Howell: I am sorry, but that is not the question I asked. It was a simple question: does the commission have the ability to initiate the right to give advice to the Secretary of State when she has not asked for it?

Helen Goodman: Yes.

David Gauke: I did not intend to raise this point at this time, but, given the helpful intervention by my hon. Friend the Member for Henley, the fact is that the role of the commission is to advise Ministers. I ask this to obtain information. Will the Minister explain why she thinks it necessary to have an outside body providing policy advice? Should not Government Departments provide advice to Ministers, who are then held accountable in Parliament?
The Bill creates a distance from parliamentary scrutiny. I think that the intention behind itthis is not necessarily a criticismmay be to create transparency in respect of advice provided to Ministers. But given that we could work out a system whereby targets exist and Government Ministers are held accountable for the decisions that they take, why is it necessary to have an entirely separate body?

Helen Goodman: It is the responsibility of the Secretary of State to establish a strategy that will achieve the targets and to work to achieve the targets. In doing so, the Secretary of State will draw on all the advice from her officials on which she normally draws. At the same time, because of significant public interest in child poverty, and following the consultation that we have conducted over the past few months, it was decided to establish a child poverty commission to ensure that the best independent advice could be given to the Secretary of State, drawing on people of exceptionally high quality, knowledge and expertise in the field.
This is an extremely important priority for the Government. That is why we believe that it is important to have transparency in the whole process, so that all those who are concerned about and interested in it will be able to see all the factors that have been taken into account, and to determine whether things have been done properly.

Graham Stuart: I am struggling to see where in the paragraph headed Provision of advice by Commission in schedule 1 it explicitly states that the commission can give advice to the Secretary of State.

David Gauke: Clause 9.

Graham Stuart: I am informed by my hon. Friend that I will see the answer if I look at clause 9. I shall now sit down with no more ado.

Andrew Selous: This has been a useful debate. On the Ministers comments about the people nominated to sit on the commission, have she and the Department given any thought to the type of individual who will be nominated? She said that nominees will be people of distinctionwe take that as read. Does she envisage that there will be some people involved in fighting poverty on the front line of their organisations who take a hands-on approachperhaps people such as Edna Speed, who came before the Committeeor does she envisage that the commission will be entirely staffed by local academics and people with a policy or research background? Would it be useful to have a mix of the two? I think it is important that we get a feel for the thoughts of the Minister regarding the balance of expertise on the commission.

Helen Goodman: If the hon. Gentleman turns to paragraph 1(4) of schedule 1, he will see the wide range of experience and knowledge that we will look for when making appointments to the commission. We will not look simply for policy and academic researchers, albeit their skills are valuable, but for people who work with children and families that are experiencing poverty.

Graham Stuart: I was perhaps not helped by my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Hertfordshire. The Minister said that the commission will be able to provide advice to the Secretary of State at its own behest. That does not seem to appear in clause 9 or schedule 1. Clause 9 states:
In preparing a UK strategy, the Secretary of State must request the advice of the Commission
and in schedule 1:
The Commission must comply with any request made by the Secretary of State...Advice given by the Commission under either of those sections must contain the reasons for the advice.
It continues:
As soon as reasonably practicable after giving advice under either of those sections, the Commission must publish the advice.
As ever, one must look carefully at the detail of the legislation to ensure that the Government are genuinely setting up an independent body of experts that can, when it sees fit and for reasons that it judges to be suitable, make public advice to the Secretary of State and try to trigger change.
It is not clear to meI could be wrong, and perhaps the Minister will reassure methat the answer she gave to my hon. Friend the Member for Henley is exactly what is included in the Bill.

Helen Goodman: I am sorry if I was not clear. Let me try to reassure hon. Members on this point.
As has been noted, the Secretary of State must request advice when preparing or revising the strategy. The Secretary of State can seek advice at any other time. The commission will not provide advice to its own time scale, but will do so in a timely manner to enable the Secretary of State to fulfil her duties.
That is a different point from the question whether the advice is genuinely independent. Given the recruitment of people with independent experience, the transparency of the process and the fact that the advice will be published, it will be clear that the commission has a proper degree of independence.

Andrew Selous: I think that this is a genuinely useful debate. We are assuming that the commission will speak with one voice and give united advice. What happens if there is a difference of view within the commissionperhaps a majority view with a significant minority view? Will there be provision for the members of the commission who have a minority view to make that view known? I do not see why that should not be possible, and it would be helpful if the Minister said something encouraging about that. There can be minority reports in Select Committees, and it happens in the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England. If the minority disagrees with the majority decision, we are able to see that in the minutes. Does the Minister favour the greatest possible transparency, to ensure that if the commission is not unanimous, the full range of views is made available to the public?

Helen Goodman: The point would be covered by the terms of reference. In practice, we will have a group of people who might have differences in emphasis. The parallel with the Monetary Policy Committee is not quite right, as that body discusses one lever that is designed to achieve monetary policy objectives. In tackling child poverty, we can have a range of policy options.

Sitting suspended for a Division in the House.

On resuming

Helen Goodman: As I was saying before the Division, the parallel with the Monetary Policy Committee is not a good one, because while it is solely focused on one objective and one target, this is obviously a more complex arena. We are making it clear that we are drawing on the expertise of a lot of people, who will be able to contribute on various different policy levers of which Ministers will want to avail themselves. I do not think that anybody realistically thinks that the targets that we are setting out in the Bill can be achieved solely through one type of policy response. I hope that it is clear in paragraphs 13 and 14 of schedule 1 that the commission will regulate its own proceedings, so we are not prescribing now precisely how it should do its work.
I should like to make a final point about the qualities of people, particularly the chairman of the commission. A good chairman seeks not to stifle debate, but to draw creatively on the different contributions of the members of a commission, and in doing so to build a consensus when possible. Certainly, they do not seek to provoke disagreement. The commission is not intended as a debating chamber; it is intended to be a body that formulates advice for the Secretary of State. Of course, on occasion, people might lay a different emphasis on aspects of that advice. In such instances, it would be interesting for people to know that, and that would be reasonable.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause 7 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Schedule 1

The Child Poverty Commission

David Gauke: I beg to move amendment 9, in schedule 1, page 16, line 12, at end insert
(1A) The appointment of the chair under sub-paragraph (1)(a) must be approved by a resolution of the House of Commons within three months of the appointment.
(1B) Before appointing a chair under subparagraph (1)(a), the Secretary of State must consult the Treasury, Work and Pensions, and Children, Schools and Families Committees of the House of Commons, or their successors..
The amendment was tabled before the recess, when little did I realise that the issue of consultation with Select Committees about appointments would become quite so topical. I am attempting to achieve two things with the amendment. First, I want to strengthen the position of Parliament with regard to the commission by enabling greater parliamentary scrutiny. The Government might look on that favourably, as the Prime Minister, in his first statement as Prime Minister on 4 July 2007, argued for greater parliamentary involvement in appointments. Indeed, he made similar remarks when still Chancellor of the Exchequer, for example on the Andrew Marr Show in January 2007.

Graham Stuart: I welcome this effort to give some parliamentary oversight. My colleagues and I on the Children, Schools and Families Committee were dismayed that the Secretary of State for that Department dismissed the recommendationor non-recommendationof the Committee on the day that that advice was made public. In fact, if I am not mistaken, he released it to the press the day before. What confidence can we have that any real parliamentary say would stem from the amendment? Did my hon. Friend think of going further and insisting on one Select Committee having power of veto over the appointment?

David Gauke: As I said, the amendment was drafted and submitted before the summer recess and recent events. My hon. Friend brings some relevant experience to the matter. The drafting of the amendment could be improved, and perhaps would need to be strengthened. I had assumed that Parliament and the Executive would be able to work co-operatively on such matters. Perhaps I was being na誰ve, or perhaps the recent events have been exceptional and future Secretaries of State would not act in such a wayI do not know; I am speculating. The row over the appointment of the Childrens Commissioner at least highlighted the fact that Parliament wishes to have its voice heard on some of these major public appointments. Perhaps when creating new appointment procedures, we should bear in mind the need to involve Parliament. It is good that Parliament can be independent in these areas.
That brings me to the second argument in favour of the proposals in amendment 9: they would provide greater credibility to the position of chair of the commission. That might not necessarily be the right approach, however. I would like to press the Minister on a wider question about the chair and the child poverty commission that arises from our previous debate. The commission will be an advisory body that has to deal with a complex set of indicators and potential policy levers. Is it right that it is an outside body? I support the independence of the Bank of England, and the Monetary Policy Committee has, by and large, worked but, as the Minister says, it is one tool that deals with one particular target. Child poverty targets are more complicated, and there is a question as to whether it is right to have a strong advisory body that is independent of the Government. If we are to have such a body, the proposal in the amendment would strengthen it. We could have hearings in front of Select Committees. There would be votes in Parliament and the opportunity to debate the appointment and scrutinise the qualities of the chair to a greater extent. That route would be more likely to result in the chair having a higher profile and being a more substantial figure in public life, which would strengthen the profile and credibility of the child poverty commission.
As I said, I have a slight reservation about the need for a separate body when developing policy, but if we are to have one, why not make it as strong and powerful as possible? Amendment 9 would be helpful in achieving that, as well as strengthening Parliaments position in that area.

Graham Stuart: It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr. Key, although given the number of interventions I have made, you might feel that I have already done so on a number of occasions.
I support the sentiments that lie behind the amendment. If we want the body to be independent, it is important that the chair should indeed face proper procedure and parliamentary oversight and approval before taking up the role. However, like my hon. Friend, I doubt whether it is appropriate in such a complex area of policy for democratically elected politicians, who are accountable to their electorate, to sub-contract policy making and the prioritisation of various measures that are required to tackle child poverty to a quasi-independent commission. The Government of the day should be responsible for getting the balance right between, for instance, the use of cash transfers to ensure that the targets are met in the short term, and ensuring that there are incentives to work and priorities for public expenditure in areas such as education, employment and skills.
I remain deeply cynical about the origins of the Bill. I cannot help feeling that it was brought about because the Government were embarrassed by the fact that they would be heading into a general election next year having failed to meet their child poverty target in 2010. So what better way of sucking in those issues when campaigning other than to do every last thing that they could to meet that target and talk about some grand Bill that would eradicate poverty in the long term? Given the discipline of my Front Bench and its focus on doing the right thing, we have always resisted temptation and the Governments hope of an artificial division. What would better have suited a failing Labour Government than to have got the Conservatives to vote against a child poverty Bill? What an excellent dividing line that would have been from the Governments political point of view, even if it did not serve the best interests of children who live in poverty?
I do not think that we should have a child poverty commission, because the Government should take full responsibility and account for themselves to the electorate, but if they intend to set up a commission, we need to ensure that it is accountable to Parliament. It must not be just a halfway house with most of the people who sit on it having been appointed by the Secretary of State, while it is claimed that it has genuine independence.

Steve Webb: I enjoyed that supportive contribution. When I first read the amendment, I assumed that it had been tabled in the light of recent events. It is particularly prescient and I congratulate the hon. Member for South-West Hertfordshire on anticipating what was coming down the track and tabling the amendment, with which my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, West and I have a lot of sympathy.
In a sense, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness asked a perfectly reasonable question about the point of a child poverty commission. One of its principal points is to be an expert pain in the backsideI do not mean an expert at being a pain in the backside, but a group of experts who, because of their expertise, can be a pain in the backside by knowing what is going on, advising on the words to be used, and reporting on why things are happening, what is not working and what needs to be done. We might think that officials were supposed to do that, because part of the Bill is about ensuring that successive Governments do something about child poverty. However, while officials might say, Minister, we are not doing enough about child poverty, we would never know because such exchanges would be a private conversation. In a sense, the child poverty commission would turn such issues into a public conversation and allow us to listen in on it and perhaps stimulate greater effort. I therefore have slightly more support for the purpose of the child poverty commission than the hon. Gentleman.

Graham Stuart: The Environmental Audit Committee has the Sustainable Development Commission report to it each year. The commission tells the Committee what progress has been made on central Government delivering on their emissions reduction targetsthis was before the Committee on Climate Change came along. It reported in public, and a glossy, expensive brochure was produced year after year, yet even the Department responsible for the policy centrally saw an increase in the carbon footprint of its own central offices. I have no faith in the ability of such a commission to make a real difference, especially one that is poorly funded and with no research skills, like the one proposed.

Steve Webb: The analogy that the hon. Gentleman draws is interesting. I think that Jonathon Porritt has been the chair of the Sustainable Development Commission. Because of that title, when he said things to the media, it was reported as, The Governments adviser says, not just, A guy from the green group says. I agree that there has not been enough progress and that the mechanism has not been as effective as it should have been.
Returning to the amendment, if we as parliamentarians can help to ensure that whoever is appointed to the rolewho may or may not survive in post longer than the Secretary of Stateis an expert and a pain in the backside, in a constructive sort of way, that would be a good thing. If that is the case, I shall lend my support to the amendment.

Helen Goodman: I welcome the fact that Members are so interested in the appointment of the chair of the child poverty commission. The Governments view is that we should have an open and transparent process. I should like to begin by saying something about the way in which we intend the appointments to be made, and then move on to the issues that have been raised, particularly by the hon. Member for South-West Hertfordshire in amendment 9.
I assure hon. Members that the appointment of the chair, and indeed all appointments to the commission, will be made with the utmost care, in accordance with the principles set out in the code of practice for public appointments, which is published by the Office of the Commissioner for Public Appointments. The code is underpinned by seven principles derived from the work of the Nolan Committee on Standards in Public Life. They include openness and transparency, appointment on merit, independent scrutiny, ministerial responsibility and proportionality.

David Gauke: Will the Minister give the Committee some idea of the time frame for appointments, assuming that all goes well with this Bill? When does she anticipate that the members of the committee will be appointed?

Helen Goodman: As the hon. Gentleman will be aware, the Secretary of State has an obligation to produce a strategy quite soon after Royal Assent. Obviously, it would be very helpful indeed if the commission was in place before the strategy was produced. One of the disadvantages of going down the path that the hon. Gentleman proposes is that it would be more difficult for us to hit all those target deadlines.

David Gauke: As the Minister says, the Secretary of State must publish a strategyI think that that has to be done within 12 months of the Bill being passed. I assume, therefore, that it will be published quite late in 2010. Is she prepared to give us an estimate of the month in which she would expect the appointments to be made? To put it another way, does she anticipate that the appointments will be made before early May next year?

Helen Goodman: I am sorry to disappoint the hon. Gentleman, but we have not got quite as far in the detailed planning as he imagines that we have, so I cannot answer that question.
Let me go back to the process that we are intending to use. We have full confidence that the process will ensure that all appointments to the commission are made fairly and in an open manner, and that candidates are selected on merit against criteria published at the start of the appointment process. Those criteria will be based on the provision in paragraph 1(4) of schedule 1 that requires the Secretary of State to aim for a commission that has knowledge and experience of child poverty policy and research, and work with families.
The entire process will be overseen by an independent person approved by the Office of the Commissioner for Public Appointments to ensure that it fully complies with its principles. That should avoid any suggestion that the chair and other members will be beholden to Ministers, political parties, stakeholders or special interest groups.
Hon. Members will have noted the principle that it is Ministers who should have final responsibility for making the appointments. That is right because it preserves the lines of accountability. The point about accountability is one of the key reasons why I will be urging the hon. Gentleman not to press his amendment. As it is the Secretary of State who will be accountable to the House for the child poverty strategy, it is appropriate that it is the Secretary of State who appoints the members of the body responsible for advising her on its content. If I might say so, I think that the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness is being slightly inconsistent by arguing that there is no point in having a commission, because it will be a totally powerless body and, at one and the same time, that it is a body over which Parliament should have control. Those two propositions are not entirely consistent.

Graham Stuart: My only point was to be helpful to those who appear to be in the majority who wish to set up such a commission. If such a commission is to be set up, the Minister is absolutely right to say that it is about accountability, and what better way for an independent advisory body to be accountable than to be accountable to Parliament, rather than to a Secretary of State?

Helen Goodman: The pointI thought that we had established this in the debate on clause 7is that the Secretary of State is responsible for hitting the targets. The Secretary of State is responsible for the strategy and for taking decisions, and is answerable to Parliament. She is therefore appointing independent advisers to facilitate the production of a strategy to enable her to fulfil her duties as effectively as possible.

Graham Stuart: Will the Minister give way?

Helen Goodman: I am sorry, but I am not going to give way again at this juncture.
There is also the question of proportionality. There are many thousands of public appointments, and it is very rare indeed for the House to have powers of final approval. An example of the type of post where the House has a final say is on the appointment of people to the Electoral Commission. That is because they must be fully independent of Ministers and answerable only to Parliament. That is not the case with the poverty commission.
The amendment would also require the Secretary of State to consult the relevant Committees of the House before appointing the chair. As set out in the Governments response to the Liaison Committees report on pre-appointment hearings, the Government believe that it would be impractical and disproportionate to subject all public appointments to pre-appointment scrutiny by Select Committees. Therefore, as stated in the 2008 White Paper, Governance of Britain: Constitutional Renewal, the Government believe that pre-appointment hearings should focus on posts in which Parliament and the public have a particularly strong interest. Examples include posts that play a key role in protecting the public interest or holding the Executive to account, as well as the post of those who are responsible for the appointments process itself.
I point out to hon. Members who raised the issue of the Childrens Commissioner that there is not a precise parallel. The remit of the Childrens Commissioner is to promote the interests of children, whereas the role of the child poverty commission is an advisory one. The Childrens Commissioner has statutory and other powers that the child poverty commission will not have.

David Gauke: I must admit that I have never really fully understood the role of the Childrens Commissioner. Can the Minister elaborate on the powers of the Childrens Commissioner?

Helen Goodman: The Childrens Commissioner has responsibility to oversee the condition of children in England. The powers of the Childrens Commissioner for England are slightly different to those of the Childrens Commissioners for Scotland, for Wales and for Northern Ireland. In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the Childrens Commissioner can take up individual cases. In England, the Childrens Commissioner simply takes a view on overall policy. The role is slightly different in England, but it is emphatically not a purely advisory rolethat is the position of the child poverty commission.
Therefore, we do not believe that, even on a pilot basis, it would be appropriate to subject the appointment of the chair of the child poverty commission to a pre-appointment hearing. Of course, I entirely accept that Parliament is extremely interested in the work of the child poverty commission. Of course, the Government have no control, or power, over the Select Committees, who are free at all times to invite whoever they choose to give evidence. One can well imagine, after the appointments have been made, and after the commission has been set up and embarked on its work, that it would be very sensible for the Select Committee on Work and Pensions, the Treasury Committee, or even the Children, Schools and Families Committee, to call members of the child poverty commission to give evidence. They will be free to do that. The amendment tabled by the hon. Member for South-West Hertfordshire is not practical or necessary, nor would it significantly enhance the role of Parliament in the policy area of child poverty.

Graham Stuart: May I tease out how independent this appointment will be? The rules about appointments are there to ensure that a person does not appoint their best mate, or somebody with whom they have an overly close relationship. They ensure that the person who is appointed is remotely competent in the area. To what extent will the chair of the child poverty commission be independent? It does not appear from the Ministers explanation that they will be. They will be appointed by the Secretary of State. In the case of the Childrens Commissioner, the appointment was made by a person from the appointments quango that checks up on the rules, one director from the Ministry of Justice and another from the Department for Children, Schools and Families. That appointment was not independent, but was controlled by Ministers. To what extent can the new position be described as independent?

Helen Goodman: I am sorry if the hon. Gentleman is not convinced by what I have said. Early in my remarks, I explained that the appointment will be overseen by an independent person approved by the Office of the Commissioner for Public Appointments. I hope that that reassures the hon. Gentleman not only that we are establishing a structure for appointing people who are independent, but that the process will be independent.

David Gauke: This has proved to be a helpful debate, but I am not convinced by the Ministers arguments. She seems to suggest that being chair of the child poverty commission is not that big a job. She says that there is a case for parliamentary scrutiny if there is strong public interest, or if the role involves holding the Executive to account. I assume, therefore, that there will not be strong public interest in the chair of the child poverty commission, and that it will not be part of his or her responsibilities to hold the Executive to account.

Helen Goodman: I thought it was quite clear that Parliament holds the Secretary of State to account, and that the child poverty commission will advise the Secretary of State. The child poverty commission will not hold the Secretary of State to account.

David Gauke: I had previously thought that the holder of the role was supposed to be a big pain in the backside, to use the words of the hon. Member for Northavon. I thought that the point of the role was to put pressure on the Government. As our Committee sittings go on, I cannot help thinking that the hon. Gentleman would perform the role splendidly. I mean that in a nice way and hope that he takes it as a compliment. [Interruption.] Well, things can change, cant they?
It seems to me that the role, as the Government envisage it, is quite small. I am not convinced by the Ministers distinction between the chair of the child poverty commission and the Childrens Commissioner, whose role is to take a view on policy. That seems to be a largely advisory role. I cannot help noting that I tabled a similar amendment in the Statistics and Registration Service Bill Committee, in relation to the chairman of the Statistics Commission. I raised the matter again in the House on 2 July 2007, when the hon. Member for Wallasey (Angela Eagle), then a Treasury Minister, said that we would not go down that route. Then, the very next day, the Prime Minister announced that the chair of the Statistics Commission would in fact be subject to parliamentary scrutiny. I do not know whether the same thing will happen with the child poverty commission.
There is confusion, and perhaps tension, as to what the child poverty commissions role is supposed to be. I understand the argument that the role should be limited, but if it is to be purely advisory, I am not sure why it cannot be carried out by the relevant Departments, unless the holder of the post is supposed to be a bit of a pain in the backside. For those reasons, I would like to press the amendment to a Division.

Question put, That the amendment be made.

The Committee divided: Ayes 7, Noes 9.

Question accordingly negatived.

Steve Webb: I beg to move amendment 49, in schedule 1, page 17, line 20, at end insert
The sums under 9(c) shall include resources to commission independent research as required..
I am reflecting on my alternative career, and in that context it is important that the child poverty commission has a research project. I do not have one yet.
The amendment deals with the child poverty commissions facilities and role. We propose that the sums that the Secretary of State will provide to the commission under schedule 1(9)(c) should include sums for research. Indeed, the impact assessment on the Bill inserts a notional figure, but we have not so far had any assurance from the Ministers that that funding will actually be made available. The reason we are trying to beef up the commission is slightly informed by our previous discussion, because it is currentlyit would be pejorative to describe it as an academic scavengerrelying on what is lying around. If there is some useful, relevant research, a commission of 14 good men and women and true will presumably know about it, will have read it, or will even have done it themselves. However, they will be performing an advisory role in a new area, because while some of the definitions used to measure poverty have been in use for a long time, other areas are quite fresh, such as some of the stuff on material deprivation, the index, the weighting and so on; they are fairly new. We certainly did not do it like that when I was a lad.
I do not think that all the research that one may require is lying around. If the child poverty commission is to have some power of initiative to ensure that it can provide the proper advice to the Secretary of State, it ought to be able to commission a limited amount of research and not simply hope that it exists. If the commission identifies a gap in knowledge, it would be appropriate for it to have a limited budget to do something about it.
There is a contrast between the child poverty commission and the Committee on Climate Change, which has a budget this year of £3.4 million. I think that the child poverty commissions budget is about 5 per cent. of that figure. Within the CCCs budget, research and consultancy is £750,000. Climate change is an awfully big and important issue, but one would think that child poverty was, too. We simply seek an assurance that research would be part of the commissions budget. Schedule 1(4)(b) suggests that the members of the commission should have experience in, or a knowledge of, research in connection with child poverty. That is obviously partly about knowing what other people have done and what the members themselves have done, but one also assumes that if people who know about research are appointed to a commission, they will be well placed to make good use of limited public funds to commission relevant research.
The £200,000 figure in the impact assessment is not outrageous for a research budget, and would enable the commission to pay for some tightly focused work that would enable it to do its job properlyto provide high quality advice to the Secretary of State in a new and developing area. I am sure, therefore, that the Minister will welcome our attempt to enhance the commissions ability to assist Ministers in their work, and will agree to the amendment.

David Gauke: The proposal comes back, I think, to the similar point about what the child poverty commission is for. If it is a big important organisation that will drive the debate, of course it should have a research budget. However, if it is there solely to provide advice, making use of research undertaken by others, that prompts the question of whether a separate organisation is necessary or whether its remit should be addressed within the Department, making use of outside expertise. We will therefore listen to the Ministers answer with great interest.

Graham Stuart: This debate is familiar. I had the pleasure of serving on the Joint Committee on the draft Climate Change Bill and, in that pre-legislative scrutiny, extracting and making the point that the Committee on Climate Change needed a decent research budget was like pulling teeth, but a reasonable budget came out in the end. The fact that research budget provision is not already in the Bill fits entirely with the Ministers vision of the child poverty commissions role. As she just said, she does not see the chair of that commission engaging with the public interest to any great extent. [Interruption.] The Minister looks disgusted. She said that there should not be parliamentary overview of the appointment because the post did neither of the two things requiredengage in a major way with the pubic interest, or hold the Executive to account. She has told us that the commission cannot hold the Executive to account, so by implication she is saying that it does not fulfil the other criteria of engaging with the public interest.
To give the commission no reasonable research budget further enfeebles it, and if it is unable even to conduct its own research into the critical areas that currently do not receive the attention that such an expert commission would give them, it will certainly continue to fail to engage with the public. If it fails to do that, it will be purposeless, and will not help to create the political momentum that all who support the Bill want to see, to ensure that child poverty stays at the top of the political agenda.

Helen Goodman: I want to make it clear from the outset that I, like Members here today, regard the commission and the advice it will offer as crucial in equipping us to meet the goal of eradicating child poverty by 2020. It therefore follows that the Government will do everything they can to ensure that the commission has the necessary resources, and that they will ensure that the resources allocated are adequate for the commission to fulfil its statutory functions.
When considering whether the commission should undertake research, balance is important. The parallel that has been drawn with the Committee on Climate Change is not strong because, notwithstanding the fact that there are areas of child poverty where techniques are developing, the truth is that climate change policy is a much less well ploughed field with many greater uncertainties and far more new issues to explore.
We have made it clear that the child poverty commissions responsibility will be to draw on, analyse and distil the huge amount of existing knowledge and research. When I say that balance is required, I mean that there is no need to establish a new London School of Economics, notwithstanding its excellent Fabian antecedents and the fact that it is 100 years since Beatrice Webb wrote her minority report for the royal commission.
I have heard hon. Members strong views, and I am sympathetic to the points that the hon. Member for Northavon made. It would be helpful to draw a distinction between the commission undertaking research and its having the power to enter into contracts to commission work in areas that have not yet been fully explored. Notwithstanding the fact that I do not foresee the child poverty commission undertaking research in the way that the Committee on Climate Change does, I am prepared to examine the proposal in detail and to see how we might make it work. With that assurance, I hope that the hon. Gentleman will withdraw his amendment.

Steve Webb: That sounds like half a loaf, which is much better than no bread at all. The amendment suggests that the commission should not carry out research, but should commission independent research. I will take what I have been offered, and I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

David Gauke: I beg to move amendment 10, in schedule 1, page 17, line 24, at end insert
(2) All such remuneration, allowances and expenses must be published monthly online..
The amendment should not detain us for long. It simply states that all payments to commission memberstheir allowances and expensesmust be published monthly online.
Members will be well aware of the increased public interest in such matters and of the need for greater transparency as far as public funds are concerned, applying to Members of the House and to those in public life as a whole. There is a general move towards much greater transparency. I do not expect the amendment to be terribly controversial and am hopeful that the Minister might accept it. As public money is being spent, the remuneration in all its forms should be available for the public to scrutinise. In the cause of greater transparency, I hope that the amendment would add to the Bill.

Helen Goodman: The hon. Member for South-West Hertfordshire proposes that the Bill should provide for payments made to members of the commission to be published online each month. He is proposing that we follow the precedent set for Members of Parliament. I understand his concern that expenditure on the new advisory body should represent value for money and be cost-efficient. It is worth underlining the importance that we attach to drawing on independent expert advice in developing the sustainable child poverty strategy.
Once established, the child poverty commission will be a public body. As such, it will comply with all parliamentary rules on managing public money, and must deliver value for money for the taxpayer at all times. In accordance with the Cabinet Office publication, Public Bodies: A Guide for Departments, relevant to an advisory body of this nature, we shall set out the total costs of the commission in the annual report to Parliament of the sponsoring Department. That report will be laid in the Libraries of the Houses. It is worth noting that our policy intention is to provide members of the commission or their employers with no more recompense than is absolutely sufficient to ensure that service on the commission does not leave them out of pocket.
We are determined that the body should offer value for money, but I do not believe that there is a parallel between the members of the child poverty commission and Members of Parliament, so I hope that the hon. Gentleman will withdraw the amendment.

David Gauke: I am disappointed with that response. I would not anticipate members of the commission having anything to hide. I assume that the Government would seek to obtain value for money and, presumably, we are looking at people with considerable expertise. I see no reason why that information should not be made available to the public. That is generally the direction that we are moving in with public expenditure across the boardmuch greater transparencyso I intend to press the amendment to a vote.

Question put, That the amendment be made.

The Committee divided: Ayes 7, Noes 9.

Question accordingly negatived.

Question proposed, That the schedule be the First schedule to the Bill.

David Gauke: I would like to return to the issues of appointment of members of the commission and when it will be up and running. The Minister was not able to be clear or was not in a position to say when members will be appointed.
The context is the intention for the child poverty commission, which moves in different directionsat one point the commission is clearly an advisory body, which is meant not to be terribly strong and powerful but a source of good advice, while at other times it tries to be an important, independent, arms length body, including in the appointment of members. Normally one would expect a Secretary of State to have a degree of discretion as to whom her advisers would be, and yet there is little in the schedule to enable the Secretary of State to change those advisersthe members of the commission. I would be grateful if the Minister made it clear how she envisages that working.
Let me be frank: a Minister and his or her advisers ought to share the same outlook about methods and so on, and there ought to be a degree of compatibility between them. I am concerned that people with a particular view of how the child poverty target should be met could be appointed to the child poverty commission before a general election. Their views might then apply to a new elected Government and the body be used to harangue such a Government and become a platform for internal opposition.
The expression on the face of the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions is such that I am already reassured that that is not the intentionsomething so ludicrous would not have crossed the minds of Ministers. I would be grateful if she gave us some idea as to when commissioners will be appointed, what ability the Secretary of State will have to choose his or her advisers as he or she thinks fit, and what can be done to prevent any party political mischief, which the cynical among us might believe could result from the commission.

Helen Goodman: I am taken aback by the hon. Gentlemans suggestion, not least because I thought that we had a consensus about the Bill. I thought that we had an agreement on the importance of reaching the targets, so I thought that we would have a consensus about how we should move forward to achieve them.

David Gauke: In all our sittings it has been clear that there is a consensus about the targets, but there are differences, at the very least of emphasis, as to how we go about that. The debate this morning revealed that, as will future debates. The job of the commission is not to set the targets, but to advise on how we go about reaching them. There are differences among the parties as to how we do that, which we are honest and open about and do not dispute. That is why I have those concerns.

Helen Goodman: I am afraid that I do not understand where the hon. Gentleman is coming from. It is impossible to predict the outcome of a general election, and it is completely inappropriate for him to make such remarks. I shall point out what is in the Bill and what the powers are.
In making appointments, it is clear that the Secretary of State cannot pre-empt Parliament, so they must be made after Royal Assentbut, obviously, the commission should inform strategy, so it must be within a year of Royal Assent. I hope that the hon. Gentleman has noted the provisions for how a Secretary of State may remove a member, in particular paragraph 6(d), which states that a member may be removed if
the Secretary of State is satisfied that the person is otherwise unable or unfit to perform the duties.
In answer to the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire earlier, I made clear that we anticipated appointing commission members with a variety of experiences and different things to contribute. Any skilful chairman running the commission would not stifle disagreementthere would be no point in setting out in the Bill, as we have, the wide range of different experiences that we wanted if we were looking for people with a single perspective.

Andrew Selous: The Minister has raised an important issue. She prayed in aid paragraph 6(d); I looked at it earlier and my reading of it was that the Secretary of State will only be able to get rid of someone if they are
unable or unfit to perform the duties of the office.
I had taken that to mean that they had either lost their mind or had done something criminally negligent to make them unfit in that sense. I had not read it at all in the sense that perhaps a new Secretary of State, in a new Parliament, might want to use paragraph 6(d) to remove people from what the Minister has told us will be an advisory body. If the Minister is saying that, I, for one, am partly reassured, although that was not my reading at all of the intention of paragraph 6(d).

Helen Goodman: Unable or unfit is not defined; it is a matter for the Secretary of States discretion. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will be reassured.

David Gauke: The Minister may say that that is for the Secretary of States discretion, but I am afraid that a Secretary of State might quickly find herself in court if she relied on those words. If it is a question of a different approach to tackling the child poverty targets, I do not think that the Secretary of State has much discretion.

Helen Goodman: We are now in the realms of the hypothetical. Opposition Members should feel reassured: the commission is independent, we have set out what qualities we will look for, and we are looking for people not with one particular perspective, but a range of different perspectives and experiences. We have also made it absolutely clear that the appointment process will be independent. I am sorry if Opposition Members would like me to go further, but I do not think that that is a practical proposition.

Question put and agreed to.

Schedule 1 accordingly agreed to.

Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned. (Mr. Mudie.)

Adjourned till Thursday 29 October at Nine oclock.